Henry David Thoreau
(1817 - 1862)
At the age of twenty-seven in 1845, Henry David Thoreau built a cabin on the shores of Walden Pond on a plot of land owned by his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson. Thoreau was imprisoned the following year for not paying his poll taxes, an experience that helped to inspire his essay “Civil Disobedience,” in which he remarked, “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.” He had spent one night in jail.